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Emotion and strategizing : exploring emotional dynamics and senior team strategizing in meetings

University of British Columbia

This dissertation explores the role of displayed emotion in senior team strategizing. It examines how the emotional dynamics generated in senior team member interactions influence how strategic issues are discussed and how strategies are constructed in organizations. This dissertation comprises two intensive case studies, each investigating the role of emotion in strategizing in one senior team‟s regular meetings. The first exploratory case study of a top management team takes a micro, fine-grained approach and identifies five distinct emotional dynamics that are associated with five different kinds of strategizing process. It shows how displayed emotions shape strategizing processes through transient relational shifts between team members. The second longitudinal case study takes a longer term view and offers a more contextualized analysis of the relationship between board members‟ emotional dynamics and strategizing processes and connects these to changes in the organization‟s strategic plan over a two year period. This case study identifies three kinds of emotional dynamic chain (a sequence of emotional dynamics) that are associated with three different sequences of strategizing processes. Two kinds of emotional dynamic chain enable the team members to have in-depth discussions and reach agreement, which in turn are associated with greater clarity in corresponding elements of the plan. The other kind generates a different sequence of strategizing processes and has the opposite effect on the strategic plan, increasing the ambiguity of certain elements. A framework of these processes is developed in which team psychological safety and members‟ approach to conflict are explored as possible mechanisms in the relationship between emotional dynamics, strategizing processes, and changes in the strategic plan. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the contributions made by these two case studies to the literature on Strategy-as-Practice, emotion in organizations, team processes, and conflict management.

Text

2013-06-23

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43879

Business Administration

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/